This was written for an anthology of non-fiction essays by Alaskans about Alaska called Our Alaska, edited by Anchorage Daily News columnist Mike Doogan and published by Epicenter Press in May, 2001. It’s about my father, who had died the year before.

I said yes, because I wanted to do homage to this regular guy who was my dad. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever written, and I was sure when I sent it in that Mike was going to kick it back — sorry, Dana, he’d say, this is just too personal.

He didn’t. I called it “A Son of Martha” after the Kipling poem. Mike’s introduction alone is worth the cover price.

Excerpt from “A Son of Martha”

He got his pilot’s license at forty-two and from then on never owned less than one plane. “You can only fly one at a time, Dad,” I pointed out when he acquired a Cessna 180 to go with the Piper Super Cub and the Cessna 172. “Yeah, but we can be in Naknek in an hour,” he said. The phone would ring and it’d be ”Hey kid! I got a new plane! Wanna go for a ride?” I’d meet him at the Lake Hood seaplane base or Merrill Field and we’d fly down to Polly Creek to go clamming or to Seldovia to visit friends or to Cordova to meet the shrimp boat or through Lake Clark Pass because it was there.

One sunny afternoon we took the Cub down the west side of Cook Inlet, sightseeing, looking at grizzlies fishing the Little Su, not flying too low over Tyonek. We landed to refuel and when we got back in the air the gas fumes from the funnel filled the cabin. I lasted as long as I could and then I smacked Dad and barked, “Put her down! NOW!” Dad hated anybody puking in his planes–during a previous flight he made a friend throw up into his own hip boot–and we plunked down on the bank of the Little Su and I bailed out before we’d stopped rolling.

Someone saw us make that abrupt descent and landing, saw a woman jump out followed by a man, and took down the Cub’s tail number. Three days later Dad called. “Hey, kid! You still alive? Good! The FBI wants to talk to you.” This turned out to be the time of the Robert Hansen serial killings, and for a few sweaty hours one afternoon Dad was a possible suspect. “Took your time getting over here,” Dad said when he answered the door. “Well, yeah,” I said, and we both laughed.

Dad loved a joke, and he never loved a joke so much as when it was on him. The first time he wrecked a plane I asked him what happened. “It was a problem of vision,” he said. “I had my head so far up my ass I couldn’t see a thing.”